At the University of Amsterdam, I am affiliated with the Television and Cross-media team and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. I received my PhD from the Université de Montréal in 2014.
My main interests concern media aesthetics and process philosophy. Combining the two interests, my work addresses the political dimension of contemporary media aesthetics, for instance in televisual narratives and video games.
For example, my book The Aesthetics of Stealth (MIT Press 2024, open access) I develop an aesthetic and cultural theory of "stealth" or tactical imperceptibility. The primary goal of stealth is to act efficiently while remaining imperceptible. The book proposes that the desire for stealth is a sociocultural response to digital media culture, due to digital technologies' unprecedented ability to track individual behavior. I argue that stealth operates as a cross-media aesthetic that can be observed in video games, television, and video art alike, particularly in so-called stealth video games, a genre that requires players to accomplish missions without being detected by in-game enemies.
My previous book Figures of Time (Duke UP 2019) investigates how the nonlinear temporalities of recent television series align with a politics of preemption. The book looks at the narrative pattern of the preempted ending, where an episode or season opens with a conflict and then goes back in time to show how that conflict came to be. The book examines these narratives to show how these leaps in time create aesthetic experiences of time that attune their audiences to the political doctrine of preemption—a logic that justifies preemptive action to nullify a perceived future threat.
I am a co-editor of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (open access) and the 3Ecologies imprint at Punctum Press (open access).
At the Department of Media Studies, I teach courses in cross-media aesthetics and storytelling, video game studies, process philosophy, and media history. I have also taught teach for the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis.